How Do You Measure a Year?

Well, that was an awfully long hiatus to go on without planning it. The first couple of months can be attributed to my general laziness, but I’ve been experiencing extreme fatigue since September, which didn’t leave me with much spare time, or at least not much spare time in which I was conscious. (As a change from my usual insomnia, instead of not sleeping, I’ve been sleeping all the time but still feeling like I haven’t been sleeping.)

I’ve been feeling a bit better lately, and the prevailing theory is something like, Hey, you have bipolar disorder with a seasonal pattern to it — did you really think you could go the entire rest of your life without that affecting you in any way? (Which is not at all the way my doctor phrased it, but I think that’s sort of what she meant.) So I suppose I should feel lucky that this fall/winter my drastic change in energy level was not accompanied by a drastic change in mood. (I do not feel lucky, by the way. If I were a lucky person, it would not have taken me fifteen cups of Tim Hortons coffee to finally win a free coffee, even though the odds for winning a prize in Roll Up the Rim are supposed to be 1 in 6. Also, I made my fiancé buy that last coffee for me in order to trick the cup into thinking that it wasn’t for me. You may scoff, but it worked.)

Anyway! Tomorrow I will go for the regular blood tests I am supposed to get because of my medication, and they will also make sure there is nothing else wrong with me, which there probably isn’t, and then it will be spring and the sun will shine and the birds will sing! And here, to catch you up a little bit, are some photos from 2010. Roughly one from each month, but not exactly. Because some months, either nothing happens, or you don’t take pictures of what does happen, or you do take pictures, but they’re crap.

2010 started like this, in a Cuban restaurant in Manhattan. That’s Mare on the left and me on the right, Yolande is taking the picture, and Yolande’s friend Carla is somewhere out of camera range.

The fiancé, who does not like his photo posted online, and I spent Valentine’s Day at the Homeport Historic B&B/Inn. (This year we went to a Goo Goo Dolls concert on Valentine’s Day.)

Back in New York on April 1, I attended an event sponsored by Scholastic and Women in Children’s Media to celebrate the release of the Baby-sitters Club prequel and the rerelease of the series. Let’s just say that this was my childhood dream. Awesomeness quotient: Meeting Ann M. Martin? Check. Being in a room full of women my age who aren’t afraid to admit that they can still remember the names of all eight Pike siblings way more easily than they can remember useful things like where they put their keys? Check. Meeting people I know online from BSC fandom? Check. Meeting the amazing and funny David Levithan, who is a great YA author himself and has edited so many other novels I love? Swoon. I want to have his babies. It doesn’t matter that he’s gay and I’m engaged. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this plan. Um, I mean… Check!

Yes, this is the same sock that was held by Judy Blume and, well, everybody at the 2009 ALA conference. So many famous authors have touched it that I know I am never going to actually wear this pair of socks except to take pictures of how they look on my feet. Which is why I still haven’t finished them — I’m not in any all-fired hurry to finish knitting socks that have become strictly ornamental rather than functional. I’ll get back to them someday, and I’ve knit plenty of other socks in the meantime.

I told you the fiancé didn’t like his photo online.

A dishcloth I knit poses with Our First Dishwasher. Oddly enough, by now the boy and I are already on Our Third Dishwasher, as last fall we moved from the apartment with Our First Dishwasher to the apartment with Our Second Dishwasher, and when Our Second Dishwasher broke in an expensive manner, our landlords decided it would make more sense to replace it with Our Third Dishwasher (okay, so technically none of these are really ours) than to fix it.

I got this in July.

I named my engagement ring Sparkly. BECAUSE HE IS SPARKLY.

The wedding, by the way, will now be a semi-elopement, since we have invited our parents. Which means we say we are having a small wedding, and people say, “Oh, with about fifty guests?” and we say, “NO. SIX.”

I got some more sock photos with Canadian rock stars when I went to a Crash Karma show. Here’s the sock with Mike Turner, formerly of Our Lady Peace.

That night I did also get a sock photo with Jeff Burrows (formerly of The Tea Party) and The Other Guy in the Band (okay, he has a name; it’s Amir Epstein), and they were also very nice and they look fine in the picture… but I’m in it, too, and I look terrible. So nobody gets to see that one.

David Usher seemed more confused by my sock photo request than the guys from Crash Karma were (and more confused than his keyboard player Kevin Young was that one time), but he posed with it anyway. This is maybe a month after the Crash Karma show, and it’s the beginning of the mate of the previous sock.

I made my ballet debut at the age of 30 as a party guest in The Nutcracker. I did not fall down.

And no picture-filled post would be complete without a kitty pic! Here’s me and my girl at Christmastime.

We’ll see if I update more often this year. And I am knitting things that aren’t socks, too, although right now I’m mostly focused on the birth record I’m cross stitching for my new niece. I started it in July, the kid was born in January, and it’d be nice if I finished it before she starts school.

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